vitasaurus

Citrus + he/she + genderfluid Mostly any angsty ship ever ~ SWERFs, TERFs, and RadFems don't even try it ~

[vitasaurus]

Nice to meet you <3

I'm Citrus (he/she)

I WILL post some NSFT shit randomly so if you're not good with that, travel safely to the nearest exit

I am on ao3 at Citrus_v_Accipiter

I'm currently into WinterBaron, Garashir, Star Trek DS9, and other Star Trek and Marvel ships, Project Hail Mary, dabbling in Heated Rivalry and The Expanse as well

If you're a TERF, SWERF, RadFem, racist, fandom cop/anti-shipper, or hater of genderfluid dykes, get gone immediately ^.^

[nicothespy]

do people still gaf about phm or am i late to the party

[tasteofgrave]

the tvl writers really just said “fuck everybody” this season. they hate autistic people, they hate csa survivors, they hate brown people, they hate lesbians, they hate nonbinary people, they hate domestic abuse victims, they especially hate women, and most of all they hate black people.

[brieariart]

Rocky and Adrian feat. Pebbles

[lutheban]

Ugh I fucking love Pebbles, this is completely unrelated to the conversation you just had but the word Pebbles and the image following it just gives me serotonin. You can put them in little baskets and carrying them around like they're eggs or put one in your pocket. They give me extreme cuteness aggression. Augh. I love them. I want every Pebbles ever to grow up happy and healthy.

here, a handful of babies

[buildingmysteri]

[saintfem]

you know i really wish i just hated this season because lestat was talking like he was on a drag race mini challenge. i wish it wasn’t as serious as flippantly cruel anti-blackness and the fundamental mischaracterization of virtually every character and the complete erasure of any love that may have existed between characters outside of their endgame pairings. i wish it wasn’t because of the erasure of trans identity, the constant punching down, the pointless retconning, the absolution of an abuse, the very obvious vitriol for the first two seasons and everything that the series has cultivated as a result of the first two seasons. i wish it was just the proverbial dangling of keys in front of the audience. i wish it was as simple as i heard “serving cunt has its consequences” turned off my laptop and never watched another episode

[cyberpumpkinpie]

[buckybarnes-40s]

“I’m with you to the end of the line”

[jeunesseoubliee]

You know it's a Gothic Horror show, and you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? I do. But do you? Do you, Rolin, and Hannah understand that? Because from where I stand, only the Black characters seem to be trapped in a horror story. The others appear to be in a completely different genre.

The issue isn't that viewers like myself don't want to feel uncomfortable. The issue is that, in this Gothic Horror show, Black characters disproportionately bear the brunt of the violence.

Take this season finale as an example.

At the end of Episode 6, two characters are beheaded. Yet in Episode 7, we are shown the severed head and mutilated body of the black character in explicit details, while the white character's mutilated body is shown only briefly and out of focus, and his severed head is hidden from us.

Louis's arc is presented as a parallel to Lestat's. Both characters are placed in situations where they must confront people they have wronged, or at least people the narrative insists they have wronged, as well as their pasts, relationships, and mistakes. (Personally, I don't believe Louis owes Armand anything, but the narrative clearly wants the audience to think otherwise.🙄🙄🙄)

Yet the way these parallel journeys are depicted are drastically different.

Lestat's reckoning unfolds in beautiful rooms, elegant spaces, and dreamlike settings. He sits comfortably while listening to the grievances of the people in his life. He argues back. He reflects. He moves through beautiful environments, from grand rooms to forests and back again. Even when he is forced to confront painful memories, the experience is framed as introspection. The focus remains on his emotional and psychological journey.

Meanwhile, Louis is placed in what looks like a torture room straight out of a Saw movie. His severed head sits on a table, hooked up to a machine. His body is positioned across from him, forcing him to stare at it. His suffering is not just physical; it is public and humiliating. His torture is broadcast for others to watch and study. His pain becomes both spectacle and data. He is joined by Regina, another Black character, whose torture is used as leverage against him.

The man torturing Louis demands an apology, not for any genuine wrongdoing, but because Louis failed to love him the way he believed he deserved to be loved, and failed to show enough empathy for his trauma. This is the same man who murdered Louis's daughter in a lynching and attempted to murder Louis in that same lynching, and who, only minutes earlier, boasted that he took aesthetic pleasure in making Louis's death visually exhilarating as part of that lynching.

And so the torture continues. Louis is pushed to the brink of death. Regina is slicing her wrist. Eventually, Louis gives in. He apologizes. He accepts responsibility not only for hurting his torturer's feelings but for the torture itself. He tells his torturer that his coldness and denial drove him (the torturer) to these actions (the torture). The torturer receives the apology he wants, ends the torture, heals and frees Regina, and leaves, but not before carving the letter "A" onto Louis's mutilated body.

Meanwhile, Lestat is still moving through beautiful settings, confronting his past, and listening to others condemn him for the failures of his life. His story reaches its climax in the final act, when he is surrounded by the people in his life and the people he has wronged, some of whom are cheering him on. Rather than being subjected to physical degradation, he is given space for self-reflection. The focus remains on his memories, his relationships, his mistakes, the horrors he has committed, and his regrets. He eventually acknowledges some of his mistakes and even apologizes to one of his victims. Instead of fleeing from his past, he chooses to face it. His reckoning culminates in understanding, and the arc ultimately ends with imagery that evokes transcendence, as though he is ascending to heaven.

Both Louis and Lestat are given parallel narrative arcs centered on confronting their pasts, their relationships, and the harm they have caused. Yet the show presents those reckonings through vastly different visual and narrative lenses. Lestat's journey is psychological, reflective, and aesthetically beautiful. Louis's journey is a sustained ordeal of physical and psychological torture, humiliation, and degradation. One character is invited to examine himself; the other is turned into a spectacle of suffering. While Lestat is afforded reflection, Louis is afforded degradation.

And I'm supposed to look at that contrast and just shrug and say, "Well, that's Gothic horror for you"? Really? Take the blinders off. Look at what is being asked of Louis and compare it to what is being asked of Lestat. One is granted introspection, reflection, and, ultimately, transcendence. The other is subjected to torture, humiliation, and spectacle. The genre does not erase that disparity. If anything, it makes it more obvious.

My issue is not the horror. My issue is who is repeatedly asked to embody that horror, whose pain is treated as spectacle, and whose pain is afforded dignity, nuance, and care.

[fay989]

Any TVL cast member being interviewed: yeah so when I first read the script I wanted to murder Rolin with my bare hands :) haha yeah he butchered my character so badly that I threw my laptop across the room :) aha and then I yelled at him for two hours which only resulted in minor tweaks to the script :) yeah I was so shocked and confused :) and he comes up with scenes that don’t make any sense in-universe. :) and I worry for the future of this tv show :) but it’s alright as long as you think about how [5 min in depth analysis of details that the cast member has come up themselves to justify the season despite these justifications not being evident in the actual show at all] aha :)

[vitasaurus]

and why was ep 7 edited like baby's first youtube edit

i saw cherik edits 11 years ago made by kids on youtube with the same exact everything, except those were passionate, compelling, and not racist

i went around telling my friend "they can't mess it up, it's so good, i trust these writers with the story" and then this??

wtf :(

[loyalhorror]

remember when season 1 handled race and racism with sensitivity and awareness and didn't just like, gloss over it or pivot to a white character's suffering right after a Black character experienced racial abuse?

i can believe claudia's ghost would throw slurs at another Black person that she hated. i can believe she would say those specific things to Louis to hurt him! if this happened in s1, i would say "yikes" and move on, trusting that the writers knew what they were doing with it and that it didn't just happen for the sake of it.

not so much seeing it in s3, which has consistently elevated its white characters above its characters of colour, has shown NO awareness of literally anything but the most basic white girl feminism ("justice for antoinette") (which ALSO pushes down the Black characters simultaneously by saying that Louis/Claudia's experience of Antoinette was "shrinking" her lmfao?!), has given no care or depth to the social issues it does depict (incest, sexual abuse, power imbalances) and instead glosses over them or depicts them humorously, has chosen "it's Lestat's story" as an excuse to retcon the narrative of the two Black abuse victims we saw in s1 in favour of exonerating Poor Misrepresented Lestat...

in light of all that, Claudia's entire rant just feels... lazy? like a slap in the face? "I liked Lestat better btw" was particularly dogshit to me. I can imagine her saying that just to hurt Louis, but given everything else about this season, it feels much more like the writers saying "See! Lestat wasn't that bad actually!" and yeah, you can argue that us seeing Lestat's POV does not mean that Louis/Claudia's ISN'T true, but... the narrative is kind of treating it like it is?? Because so far we haven't had Louis go "Actually, no, that's not how I remember it" in response to any of Lestat's "corrections" (partly because they've barely been onscreen together lol. there isn't really the opportunity for it) so it's just like. All we have is what the show is actually showing us. Which so far has been "Lestat wasn't an abuser, Claudia was a liar and Louis was crazy". Sighs.

Idk man. Usually I would say "let the tale seduce you, trust the writers here" but I do not think that 6 episodes in out if 7 they're somehow going to make everything better in retrospect. Yknow??

(and crucially, I'm not saying that Black characters CAN'T be liars, or unreliable, etc. they should be, just as much as any other character! i don't want Louis and Claudia as innocent victims! but the COMPLEXITY is the point, not this absurd "the white guy was the Most Maligned and everything these (Black) people said about him wasn't true" shit. sighs.)

[halfterdark]

big big big fan of platonically, horrendously codependant grace & stratt.

like it starts with sharing passwords and whatnot, but then they have the keys to each others' rooms. grace is glued to her side like they're conjoined twins. she brings him along to meetings to science translate like he's her emotional support dog. he brings her lunch because she always forgets. they both fall asleep working in one office or lab or another all the time.

eventually they straight-up form their own way of communication. grace can say something on the same level of incomprehensible as "carl and i made a baby" and stratt will respond with some obscure hand gesture, and both of them will completely understand. they hold entire conversations like that. one day ilyukhina pops her head in the door to ask grace a question, witnesses this, and wordlessly backs away. she'll ask dubois.

there's a betting pool going on on whether they're hooking up, but one day someone finds out that grace is aroace or something, and it becomes immediately and violently clear that something much more concerning is going on with them.

i don't know. just. yes

[junefiress]

i just think they should leave starfleet alone and start making hbo rome esque political intrigue dramas about vulcan/romulus. like the idea that there are 50000 aliens and they just never use them on their own. when do i get the wire on ferenginar ?!?!! bajoran andor??!?!?!!!!

[purplespacekitty]

been thinking a lot lately about the existence of Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and what it means for 24th century Earth.

because on one hand, narratively, it’s an important piece of establishing the character of Benjamin Sisko - it tells us where he comes from and what kind of family raised him. the family restaurant situates him in a particular historical and cultural context by showing us that the Creole food he cooks on the station is something he and his son quite literally inherited and is part of a continuation of Creole culture in New Orleans centuries ahead of the here and now. it is the antithesis of Star Trek’s usual watered-down and whitewashed approach to various Earth cultures, where established characters of color are stripped of their culture in order to fit into the homogeneous Human.jpg box Star Trek likes to put its human characters in to contrast with the aliens of the week - all under the guise of equality. textbook allegorical storytelling. what sets Sisko apart from this tendency is that he is not just a Starfleet captain who happens to be Black, he is explicitly written as a Black American captain whose identity and family history is deeply rooted in the legacy of his ancestors. on this hand, Sisko’s Creole Kitchen is a vessel of cultural preservation.

and on a sort of different hand, Sisko’s Creole Kitchen is a very clear example of community-based food sovereignty on a post-capitalist Earth. on this Earth, Joseph serves his patrons without any expectation of compensation for his and his kitchen staff’s labor, which means that he’s likely not paying for anything that allows him to keep running the restaurant. might seem a bit contrary to the whole concept of a restaurant, but that’s what i’m trying to get at, here.

in a future where every starship and probably most homes are equipped with replicators that can create pretty much anything for you, farms and restaurants and even the act of cooking might seem a bit redundant. so why continue those traditions at all?

well, the concept of a restaurant in the world of today is, essentially, to eat a meal that you don’t have to prepare for yourself, as well as for chefs to share cultural ties through food and creativity with others. it’s both a time-saver for consumers and a platform for culinary art. but it also commodifies food, the act of cultivating it, the act of consuming it and the act of making it.

in a post-scarcity society, where, presumably, no one is required to work long hours at the expense of their physical and mental health just to keep a roof over their head, everyone should, in theory, have enough time to put as much effort as they choose into preparing their own food. of course, cooking is not everybody’s particular love or strong suit, so the appeal of restaurants as access to good, fresh food remains.

the fact that Sisko’s even exists is indicative of, once again, the act of cultural preservation and also of the necessity of establishments that feed their surrounding communities through a labor of love. the best reason to cook is because you love doing it and Joseph clearly values culinary artistry and the cultivation of fresh ingredients, so he must not only be supporting those who come to his restaurant but also those who fish, rear livestock, grow produce and those who help prepare them to be served. in this way, his restaurant could be a very direct system by which he keeps other foodways alive. and, again, presumably - because none of this is based on a system of currency or capital and food is not a product but a facet of the community - it's plausible and, in fact, necessary that all of this is done on the terms of those involved. so on that hand, Sisko’s Creole Kitchen is a cornerstone of food sovereignty on 24th century Earth.

[kelaroue]

Some sketches by @delta-yuri that she let me color ❤️ she does beautiful line work and posing ^v^